I realise this is not something one would wish to do very often, but I had to get rid of two largish hazel trees on my boundary, so this is my method: I drilled a hole about 8mm diameter and about 5cm deep into the trunk just above ground level, sloping the hole downwards. Into the hole using a syringe I injected about 5cl of glyphosate. Now three months later the hazel is clearly dead as it has no leaves while its neighbours are growing new leaves.

A tree can be killed by girdling, the removal of about 3" of bark all the way around the base of a tree. A little labor intensive, but easier on the environmental conscience, although as herbicides go, glyphosate is fairly benign.

This is crazy.And I totally agree with redsquirrel on this.I too have been following the fairly recent research into Glyphosate, and the news ain't good.

It's being linked to gluten issues, autism, IBS, alzheimers, dementia and all sorts of other nutrition/digestive-related issues.It is a herbiCIDE after all, CIDE meaning "to kill".

This is why we should be eating organic food, not because it's "better" but because non-organic is potentially toxic.Glyphosate is the most commonly used herbicide in the world, and wheat is the most "sprayed" crop in the world.Remember that Monsanto have a pretty good track-record in making bio-weapons for the military, these people are not our friends.

If you want to kill a tree I would recommend the more "natural" methods, like just keep cutting it back until it dies, for example.Or you could cover it with an opaque material so that it has no light.

Well, I gladly stand corrected. Thank you redsquirrel and monkeyboy. Well done. A good case for reading beyond the advertising rhetoric if there ever was one. Science seems to develop solutions that fix minor problems only to create greater problems that might not have a solution.

I guess you haven't read much on the effects of roundup, from your reply. There is no "legitimate" use in the plant world for poisons in general. The environment worked well enough before them. Roundup does not only starve plants of nutrients, it locks up micro-nutrients so they are unavailable to plants grown after treatment. Roundup is an antibiotic and kills soil bacteria and gut bacteria. There are fields in the UK now where almost nothing will grow, yet adjacent fields managed using organic methods produce good crops. Additionally the amount of insect life and their predators has increased over the last 5 years in those fields. It is not necessary to kill everything but the intended crop, which is the method used by modern agriculture.

Glyphosate is very widely used, and has been for some time. It can be, and is, used on senescent cereal crops pre-harvest to clear weed to make harvesting easier (and less officially to speed the senescence to save drying costs). Application of overall glyphosate is the invariable last act before entering organic conversion to get weeds under control. If it were so deadly, we would know by now.

On the other hand - our society is as dependent on agrochemicals as we are fossil fuels. We would have to shed about 1/3 of the population to manage without the Haber process.

It's not necessarily deadly, but it is toxic.The World Health Organisation has recently stated that glyphosate is "probably carcinogenic".There's nothing safe about any 'cide.Most digestive related issues are chronic and can take decades to be traced to specific causes.

Also, talking of not believing everything thing we read;Fossil fuels aren't actually fossil fuels!They are probably primordial constituents of the planet, as they are with many planetary bodies, but nobody actually knows for sure.We've just been taught the fossil fuel theory for so long that it's stuck.I wonder if that also applies to other ideas, like not being able to grow enough food etc?

Sorry I have been away for so long. I have moved, and some of the time since then has been spent in a hospital. Obviously not fatal . What I do not understand is why you had to kill the tree in the first place. Perhaps the tree was menacing a structure e.g. your house. Perhaps you plain didn't like it. Blameless. But once you have killed it, it is still there, only dead. And just as dangerous and/or unsightly. It must be cut down. Now felling trees is something I have done. But never near a power cable, house, shed, whatever structure. The thing must fall just so. In the state of Alaska, the power company will deal with the first case. In all other cases, unless you are a professional arborist, I suggest you grit your teeth, and hire one. They are very expensive and their insurance premiums are one reason this is so, as well as the skill involved. The discussion on pesticides is valid, but irrelevant. Don't kill it. Just have it cut it down.

The trees were hazel on the limit of my property causing damage to a wall. The glyphosate has done its job and I have removed the trees. I suppose they could have been removed while still alive but I wanted to kill the roots also.